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Wednesday, 20 June 2012

'History in my Hand: The Beauty of Books' by A.L. Berridge

Today I’m going to attempt an entire
post without mentioning the Crimea. This is difficult while I’m in the ‘total
immersion’ stage of writing about it, but a few weeks ago I found a different
and really obvious subject staring me right in the face.

I was in the basement of Goldsboro Books in Cecil Court, the
torture-chamber where publishers send us to ‘sign and line’ a seemingly endless
stack of our own books. Proprietor David Headley once suggested my ‘lines’
should be the entire opening paragraph, and after churning out the first pile my
wrist was so locked I couldn’t write for a week.

I’m wiser now, and the line for ‘Into the Valley of Death’ (which
is about the Crimean War, by the way) was simply the last one: ‘the light of
her lamp shone like hope’. But it’s
still hard work for authors so used to a keyboard they’ve forgotten how to
write their own name, and it was as I paused to shake my wrist that I began to take in the magic of my surroundings.

Books. Hundreds of hardback books
gleaming in polished rows along the shelves. Light brushed gently over the satin
of matt-finished covers, glinted in the reds and blues of embossed lettering,
and flashed in the touches of gold and silver foil. The floor creaked overhead
as customers browsed about the shop, but I was alone in a treasure house hushed
with the beauty of books.

A particularly beautiful book. It's set in the Crimean War.

I returned to my task with a new reverence. The
books I was signing were no longer just ‘my novel’; they were tangible,
precious things with an existence beyond the words. How can one sign an e-book?
What would be the point? Digital download is merely ‘content’, but a real book
is an experience bound into physical form.

And with form comes history. Even what I was doing now was a
ritual dating back over many years. At Goldsboro itself I was only one in a
stream of writers who had sat at this table – a fact of which Robert Fabbri
reminded me when he came in that afternoon to sign copies of his fabulous
‘Rome’s Executioner’ and thanked me for keeping the seat ‘warm’. Sic transit gloria mundi indeed.

The feeling is hardly unique to Goldsboro. Visitors to Brown's Hotel in Albemarle Street will have seen the cherrywood desk at which Kipling wrote 'The Jungle Book', but not all will know that the best part of a century later Steven King sat at the same desk and wrote the entire first draft of 'Misery' by hand. He too wanted to feel part of that chain of history, connected to those who had gone before by the physical reality of a wooden desk, real paper, a real pen - and real books.

The human part of the chain is fallible. Kipling collapsed here the day he died - only hours after signing a copy of 'The Absent-Minded Beggar' for the head porter, telling him jokingly it would be worth a lot of money when he was dead.
I doubt he'd have minded the irony. He knew what I'm only just learning: that if writers are transient, their books are not.

That's still true today. Some
may be pulped, others may land in the hands of those extraordinary people who
are capable of putting a book in a dustbin, but as a general rule books survive. When we croon over our latest purchase
of a verified antique, we may be quite unaware that our bookshelves contain artefacts
even older. If you come from a family of readers they almost certainly do. Even
my copy of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is signed by my great-aunt and was printed in
1926.

Many are far older. Trawling through my own collection I
found a number from the 19th century, among them an 1855 edition of
Keats’ Poetry – which places it, incidentally, in the time of the Crimean War.

Others include a Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ dated 1818, and a sadly coverless ‘Miscellany
of Prose and Verse’ printed in 1713.

They’re not worth much, since their condition bears witness to the handling of many generations, but that doesn’t lessen
their value to me. When I pick them up I’m holding history in my hand.

And not in the sense of something dead. To read a physically old book is also to gain an appreciation of how it was perceived at the time. Which is why I like reading Shakespeare in this particular edition - an 1866 photo-lithograph of the 1623 Folio. I feel a connection to its own first readers by reading it in the same form.

Katherine Langrish evoked exactly that feeling in her beautiful post
about Penguin Classics. It's for similar reasons that I love my tatty
Penguin crime paperbacks, which summon up a world of ‘between the wars’
austerity – the world in which Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and
Josephine Tey made their names by being published in a medium many
considered ‘pulp’.

Then there’s this, the oldest book I own.

It’s a terribly battered thing, but it’s the first part of the
narrative poem ‘Hudibras’, and it’s dated 1684 – just four years after Samuel
Butler died.

This book would not have seemed strange to him. It would
have looked much as ‘Into the Valley of Death’ looks to me, and every bit as
beautiful.

But its life still goes beyond that of the author. When this
book was printed there was a King on the throne of France and no such place as
the United States of America. The man or woman who owned it may have seen
Charles I while his head was still on. That’s the chain that binds us all the
way back through time: not the author but the readers, the people who’ve owned
this and turned its pages. It is impossible to look at a really old book and
not wonder through how many hands has it passed – and whose.

Because books travel. They’re gifted and borrowed, they’re
passed down the family as their owners die, they end in second-hand bookshops where
somebody buys them to start the cycle all over again. Every owner leaves his
aura on it. Sometimes it’s regrettably obvious, like the unsavoury yellow stain
we’ve all at some time encountered on the pages of a second-hand book. A fastidious friend of mine avoids second-hand books altogether because he
never knows ‘whether they mightn’t have been read in the lavatory’.

But sometimes the traces are altogether more poignant. It
wasn’t only authors who signed their books in the last century, and if you look
inside some of your older ones you’ll find inscriptions to make you smile – or break
your heart. ‘For Mollie on her confirmation, knowing she will be a good girl’. ‘To Edith, with love. Michael. July 1914’. If that isn’t history –
real, human history – then I’d like to know what is.

I'd like to finish with one of my own favourites, a little
leather-bound devotional book called ‘Wilson on the Lord’s Supper’. The original owner was a C.R. Haines, who was a pupil at Wellington, but seems to have gone on
to be a teacher at Uppingham. Nothing very special, perhaps – until you look
inside.

Attached to the back cover is a little wallet, within which I
found three letters dating from 1871. There are two between Haines and his
mother (to whom the boy affectionately signs himself ‘C.R. Haines’), and another
from his teacher, a Mr A.F. Griffith who is recommending his pupil for
confirmation.

Haines was confirmed
that year, and that Griffith was right in his estimation of his character is
evident in the prayers handwritten into the blank pages of the book, and also
the holy pictures carefully pasted in to face them. This isn’t just a book – it’s
an album of a life.

And death. One item pasted in his book is this 1892 newspaper
cutting about the mysterious demise of that long ago and still beloved teacher.

There were other losses too.

A closer look at that last page
reveals a list headed ‘My old Uppingham boys killed in the war’.

Haines knew every one of them. He taught them, these
children who were sent over the top to mutilation and death, and he records
their names in the book that to him was the most sacred. Each is a history in
itself, though the name of Lascelles, VC , is the only one so far to which I’ve
been able to attribute detail.

Even Haines’ own death is here, reflected in the touching
note to his executors added in a failing hand onto the front page.

I suspect Gregory didn’t
‘wish to have it’, and maybe ‘Richard’ didn’t either. It was cut loose from
its family and came first to my father and then to me. But I do ‘wish to have
it’, every word of it, and he doesn’t need to have been my ancestor for me to
read this with love.

But our day is over. People no longer sign their books or
paste in pretty book-plates. Books are dispensable, and as far as e-books are
concerned all that physical stuff is ‘history’. So it is, perhaps – but to me ‘history’
is not a derogatory word.

Real books remain a treasure, and one that will survive power-cuts,
server failure, famine, plague and war. Even mine will. Some of those books I’ve
signed will outlive me, and one day in 2140 someone will pick one from a towering
stack in a barn in Hay and wonder who A. L. Berridge was, and what was so
special about a thing called ‘the Charge of the Light Brigade’.

I won’t be around to tell him, but my book will. You see, I
may not have mentioned this, but it’s set in the Crimean War.

24 comments:

Wonderful! I love looking at the inscriptions in old books, too - though I don't have anything as wonderful as one with a pouch of letters. It's true that people rarely write messages in books they give as gifts - perhaps in case the recipient doesn't like the book and wants to change it or pass it on, or perhaps because we have become reluctant to write in books. So maybe those signed by the author will be the only ones with messages in the future. How strange and sad.

What a lovely post! I'm jealous of your wonderful old books. The best I have is an old hardback copy of Catriona which has a book plate in announcing it was given as a prize for Sunday School attendance. I bought it for 20p at a fete and treasure it.

Great post, Louise, thank you. I love the inscriptions in old books. I bought a book about pirates sometime back (Masefield's 'On The Spanish Main') and was convinced the numbers scrawled in the margins were clues to buried treasure. Here's an inscription from the same book: 'the accidents of life do more for us than all our plottings'.

Charles Reginald Haines was born in Mumbai in 1856. He was a master of Dover College before Uppingham. He seems to have retired from teaching in about 1910 to concentrate on lecturing and the study of literature. He wrote books on Christianity & Islam in Spain, and Marcus Aurelius. He married when he was about 55. Gregory and Richard were his sons, I think also a daughter Dorothea.(In case you're interested!)

Mark, you are brilliant. I'd traced him to Dover College, but hadn't got a date of birth and found no trace of a daughter. I am salaaming like mad to your superior Google-Fu.

I think his father must have died not long before those letters were written, as his mother's are both black-bordered. I suspect Griffith became something of a substitute father at that most impressionable time.

I wish I'd know that d.o.b. before I wrote this. I could have mentioned incidentally that he was born during the Crimean War...

Really loved this post. have had a quick poke about on the bookshelves near the computer, and found a lovely copy of The Three Musketeers, which was awarded to my Uncle George as a form prize in 1937. And actually, the maths makes this terrible: this was a prize for his first year at secondary school: only eight years later, in 1945, he was shot down over Germany - he was a rear-gunner. How can that be? he could only have been 20. No wonder my Grandma never forgave the world.

Sue - wow. That's tragedy, isn't it, and all from just a name and a date in a book.

Knowing intellectually how young someone was when they died isn't at all the same thing as holding their book in your hand and knowing the future they never saw coming at all. Particularly when the book is a prize to a young person when the future was still shiny with hope.

It's daft, because he died years ago and you can't have known him, but I feel myself wanting to say 'I'm sorry'.

His father, Robert Haines, died of a fever in April 1866 in Mumbai aged 44. He was Surgeon in His Majesty's Indian Army and Principal of the Grant Medical College, Bombay. CRH obviously held him in very high regard and wrote in his will: 'I desire that my body should be shrouded in my father's dressing gown, as the mantle of a good and great man'. Haines wrote at length about his father in his book on his ancestor Richard Haines, online here:http://tinyurl.com/cb9a4kc

A very moving post indeed. And why books are so....inimitable. Kindles are something completely different. They're not books. Books are special in just the ways you point out: they have histories. They hold memories. They are magic.

Mark, you're really terrifyingly good at this. I should have researched it properly before posting, but it's wonderful what you've found - it really rounds out those lives and makes the book even more precious. I think I should try and trace the family to see if there's a descendant who'd like to have the book.

Adele - yes. 'Magic' is right. When a cat watches someone reading a book, it must think there's magic involved - their owner sitting holding this stupid object that makes them laugh and cry, and can hold their attention for hours without apparently doing a single thing. Magic indeed.

And Kath, that's such a beautiful phrase: 'the fingerprint of time'. Absolutely perfect.

Louise, I love this post too! How moving C.R. Haines's book is, with its personal records and that heartbreaking list of the boys who died in WWI. It's a continuation of the centuries-old tradition, isn't it, of making the family bible or prayer-book the repository of important dates (births & deaths etc) - I wonder if the instinct for that genre of personal record-keeping got passed along, in a different form, to the family photo album once such things existed?

As a P.S., I have a little book I found as a teenager in a 2nd-hand bookshop called 'How To Talk Correctly' (which is quite something in itself!). Inside the back cover is a small unfinished sketch of a face. Inside the front cover, there are pencil inscriptions, each in the same lovely copperplate handwriting: Colin C. MacphailShip "Arctic Stream"31st December 1910-110 Alexandra ParadeGlasgow-Spoken by [?] S/S "Banffshire" homewardPassed Barque "Invercauld" of Aberdeen 5[degrees]SLeft Port Pirie S. Australia 2nd April 1912Channel for orders [?]; crossed the Equator 69 [underlined twice!] days out

I imagine Colin Macphail on those long sea journeys, spending his spare moments trying to teach himself how to talk 'correctly'... and then, of course, I wonder what happened to him in 1914...

Edi, that's a beautiful comment - thank you so much. You're right to mention the smell in particular, the 'breath of history' that wafts from an old book. Sometimes it'sd quite specific - in 'Land's Edge' Tim Winton talks about reading such books in a seaside hut and recalls the smell of 'antiquity and fried bacon'...

And welcome, Mr Anonymous whose name might just be Simon... That's a great discovery in your 'Ensor's England'. These days I ALWAYS look for signatures in books before I even buy. You never know...

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I found your post most interesting. Particularly your comments about C R Haines, who was in fact a Housemaster at Uppingham. I have a beautiful leather bound book of poetry by Keats given to my grandfather, who was at Uppingham, and it is inscribed with my grandfather's name and the words "from his friend and housemaster. C R Haines Aug 1896"

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